Elon Musk Thinks We’re Probably Living In A Video Game!

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We’ve been hearing a lot about simulation theories lately, and more people are now concerned about whether our universe is real or not. Recently, Elon Musk has joined the club: he thinks we’re probably living in some sort of a video game. Here are the details...

So let’s start from the beginning. What’s the deal with simulation theories anyway? Here's how Elon Musk explains it...

AND, of course, we now have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously. Experts believe that soon we’ll also have virtual and augmented reality.

So it’s pretty plausible to think that games will be indistinguishable from reality; even if it takes 10,000 years, that’s where we’re headed. After all, 10,000 years is nothing on the evolutionary scale.

So if that’s the case, some people conclude, it’s possible that we’re not living in base reality even now.

So the journalist Josh Topolsky asks further questions of Elon Musk about these theories...

"There's a one in a billion chance we're in base reality," Musk replied. He continued:

"Arguably we should hope that that's true, because if civilization stops advancing, that may be due to some calamitous event that erases civilization. So maybe we should be hopeful this is a simulation, because otherwise we are going to create simulations indistinguishable from reality or civilization ceases to exist. We're unlikely to go into some multimillion-year stasis."

For many years, philosophical and scientific theories have been put forward to explain why reality is an illusion.

The simulation argument was originally proposed by Nick Bostrom in 2003. Bostrom and other authors suggested that there is empirical evidence that the simulation argument is valid. Experiments were also conducted at Bonn University in Germany in 2012 and the results indicated that upper energy limits are signs of the validity of simulation arguments.

Here’s what upper energy limits are all about...

Under normal conditions, a simulation program would set limits on a model in a 2 or 3-dimensional space that proceeds in time. In other words, we can’t go beyond the boundaries of what the simulation allows us if we’re in a simulation. That’s exactly the case for our universe: For example, we cannot make any changes on the Planck constant, or we can’t move faster than light.

So there comes the question of a possible “creator” again: What’s been there the whole time, from the beginning, if this universe is a simulation?

We’re far from answering these questions yet. There may or may not be a creator. There may be a higher civilization, but that civilization may also be a simulation of a more advanced simulation. So for now, let’s just be amazed by how an incredible and radical an idea like simulation theory became so mainstream and popular!